The first by pass in your county

[Cian]

County I live in - Kill/Johnstown in the mid 1960s by the then D2 Naas Dual Carriageway - not sure which end of the project (63-68) it got done. Then nothing else until 1983 and again til 1993!

All primary road in the entire county is now D2/D3 and primarily motorway status.

I think that road (N7) had one of if not the first D2's in the Republic and the first Motorway in the Republic (The Naas bypass)? I was looking up some of the Irish entries on the Wiki the other day and came across it.

Yes, largely correct.

The N7 Dublin to Naas dual carriageway was the first decent stretch of DC in the Republic, built in stages from the 1950s to completion in 1968. But the very first section of DC was in Foxrock, a very affluent leafy Southside suburb of Dublin, a short 1km section on the N11 built in the 1940s. It was very narrow with only a narrow hedge separating each carriageway and was rebuilt and widened in 2000/1.

The M7 Naas by-pass was the first motorway in RoI, opened in October 1983. All 8km of it!!

There were very very few bypasses in the Republic until the 1980s.

I had some idea the Long Mile was dualled first but can't find any evidence at all so I'm probably wrong.

Found a news article from '52 saying there was 1.66 miles dualled on the N11 by then. Its now dualled for 120km!

[Glenn A]

An early contender in London( technically Kent then) would be the A2 Shooters Hill by pass, which was built in the 1920s, and became the Rochester Way. However, ribbon development meant the road became choked with traffic and it had to be by passed again in the 1980s.